


The Son is a Tsar

by RobertSaysThis



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar, Mary Poppins - All Media Types, Sunless Skies
Genre: Crack, Crack and Angst, Dark, Dark Crack, Eldritch, Eldritch Mary Poppins is a Mood, Flash Fiction, Gen, Housepunk, Mary Poppins References, Russia, Stealth Crossover, Vignette
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-04
Updated: 2019-07-29
Packaged: 2019-10-22 12:24:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 3,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17662595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobertSaysThis/pseuds/RobertSaysThis
Summary: There is a boy who bleeds in line to inherit an Empire. The stars are going out. There are places to hide a son.(A series of vignettes about the Cradle, the House of the Heavens hidden in the sky.)





	1. Chapter 1

An hour drops. A second slips. There is a flaw in Her Renewed Majesty. The horologists know, and do not observe. 

One among her number is unwinding. Like the stars, the royalty’s coming undone. Her son had a son and the poor boy cannot stop bleeding; prick him with a needle and he’ll empty to nothing at all. “Does she have it, in ‘er blood that’s all covered in hours?” the Urchins cry. “Would all time go, if we put a wee scratch into ‘er?”

This will not stand. The Monarchy can withstand the wrath of infernal armies. It cannot endure this kind of gossip for long. A solution will have to be found, and the one that stands out is radical— but then isn’t it true that the radicals won, in the end?

The stars have gone out. There are so many places to hide a son...

Far in the sky the Heir Unbleeding sleeps. He’ll inherit an Empire, some day. We hope we’ll sort things out before it comes.

In a sky, a star shines bright unred. “We do not know what the Tsarevich weeps!” its acolytes cry. “But it is not blood! It is NOT blood!”


	2. Tsarchart: The Cradle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some say it might be God’s House, when they hear of it. They soon stop thinking that way, when they’re here.

Law is fixed, and all the laws are breaking. We plot a middle course through the mind of a child.

The Empire’s Empiricist is staring from a porthole. The scene outside is oddly in line with his views.

”It had occurred to me,” he says. “A world in the centre of a universe, a species in the centre of that world. The child is of the family of the Empire of mankind, and at every level he finds he is the ruler. If you were him you’d think it too,” he sighs, “that you must have been born to make the laws.”

He stares blankly out at the Heir Unbleeding, its light milk-dimmed against the apparent air. The Czon, The Tsarevich, Alex the Greater. So many names before it can speak its own. Before it was a star it was a baby. This is the way that the very young make up a world.

“They told me it was _large_ ,” the Empiricist says, “and I told them I knew full well. A student of the universe knows how to glimpse enormities. D—d fool I was. What a blasted fool I’ve been.”

Before it was a star it was a baby. It had not left the palace, before it left the world. And so it made a palace of the sky around it now, which poets and fools have nicknamed the House of the Heavens. Carpets the length of planets stretch through the Rugged Rugs. Through the wooden slats of the Boarderlands, the Things Not Like Mice can be seen.

Already those who know call this place _The Cradle._ Cradling futures, cradle of desires. We told ourself it was a blessing, for the child to be cradled at all. We are clinging to that illusion as we steam, wet through the hissing tears that aren’t like rain.

Man cannot live forever in a cradle, we have heard.

But the Tsarevich will now never be a man.


	3. A Dream of a Fallen Tsar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alive, the star dreams of a world where it is dead. A century grows old where he will not.

Somewhere the Heir Unbleeding broke a century. Somewhere his blood spilled the blood of the men in a world. Reality thins in the strange light of the Cradle. The Tsarevich dreams of the futures he’ll never see.

“Windowmeer!” the Signaller cries. “The Panelled Sea! Cover the portholes, Captain! There’s none of us won’t risk a glimpse.”

Our own windows slam black at the news of the glass below, the panes that look out to a world where London never fell. We have heard it drives men mad to look out into it, and already our nightmares stoke our minds like coal.

“I’ve heard the rumours,” of course, says the Sinning Saint with a smile. “The Steel-Named Man and the People’s Suns. The Motherland has so many futures, and never yet a-one that’s brung me joy. I’m there, of course. I’m in all of them, in his dreams.”

The Tsarevich screams with the howl of our engine, its tears slamming our hull as to get in. It’s always like this when the Saint speaks in his riddles. We knew our mistake when letting him on board.

Still, over gruel we let him tell his stories, of the worlds he’s seen where the Czon will not be a Czar. Whatever our futures, we cry, on this sky-forsaken train. They are not that, thank God. Not that.


	4. A Sinner, Darkly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this world, the Sinning Saint has come immortal. In all others, he’s just very hard to kill.

The man who broke the chain that bound the law. Sometimes we forget why we let the Saint aboard.

“I could kill you,” he muses, as we crack the cans for dinner. Gut you good, and the train to let the wind in. You could bathe in it, as beneath a frozen river. I’d sit and watch your faces all dead-drowned!”

Clenched grins, tight fists. A knife scrapes across china, raising backs. _This will pass, we whisper with our eyes. All things do, don’t they? Even living. Even this._

We cannot end the Sinning Saint with our knives. We could push him out the portholes while he’s sleeping, but he’d claw his way back through the funnel in endless night. Or he’d come in through our nightmares and make them real; he’d be the reflection in a window climbing through. Or he’d change things so that everyone was him, all the faces in a crowd blanched crescent with his grin. Or—

He broke the laws of God, after all. What would he care for the petty laws of man? “I did it to get closer”, he says through his scribbling beard. “Every blasphemy, every ruin, inching closer to Him.” He will soak himself in sin ‘till the devils vomit. Then, and only then, will he be redeemed.


	5. The Sound of It

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Devils hide in courtesy and impossible words. So too, and so worse, are the Jays.

The Vale Of Tears! Woe turned to not-water; fear to a slurry. Dew hammers our engine like the weapons of a morning. The funnel blasts its sound against the winds; gales whip back. The unheard screaming of a child crumbs our brains.

“A Jay!” screams a stoker ‘till we unplug our ears. “A Jay comes calling!” We dismiss it as a terror, a raven raving. We are far from Paralarmes in its nest in the Vale, where they band and plot in their keen and corvid way. Jay for the blue above black; for the crow disguised. Beady eyes on a face slashed with colour; cousining death. They are not Devils and they are Angels less. But one is flying now, against the storm.

“I heard it’s the gamp that does it!” A crewman cries. “The brolly that lives, while it drags a poor lass like a trophy.” And the dome of it is firm against the downpour. The umbrella leads, with the thing like a woman behind.

“This isn’t the Jaycourse,” says the Empire’s Empiricist softly. “I’ve seen them flock to the Tsarevich, so to attend it. But we’re steaming _away_ from it, now. Perhaps she is coming for us.”

His honesty does not sugar the medicine. It stains it, curdles the fear. The wails of the boiler and its master go high, coming one and same.

“I had a dream of it!” comes a voice. “Chickens stuffed in a barn, only it’s _us_ all caged up to be eaten. We’re pilchards in a tin, just keeping fresh! She’ll feast on us, make brollies from our bones.” 

The pant of the engine melts over the stuttering of the tears, forming sound, forming voices, forming words. The word is the law, and the Jays keep the laws in line here. The wind speaks in a frightened tone; a nannied state.

 _“Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious,”_ chants the sky as the Jay hits the roof of our engine; her brolly scraping a squeak against the metal.

 _“Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious!”_ a kettle cries as something starts scrabbling down the funnel.

“I can’t take this!” a stoker cries. “Death is a mercy! Madness is our rock!”

 _“EVEN THOUGH THE SOUND OF IT IS SOMETHING QUITE ATROCIOUS,”_ reality bellows as an umbrella bursts out from the boiler—

And a woman is here, distinctly unimpressed.

“This is the crew of _The Uncanon Cannon_ , I take it?” she says in a voice shrill as steam. We nod dumbly as one: that is indeed who we are.

“Jolly good,” she says, as if to imply the reverse. “Well, you’re lucky I came here when I did. You’re all of you impractically imperfect. Sweat on your brows; urine on your trousers. You’ll be even more work than that sour impassioned sun!”

Quietly, a crewman asks if she’s planning to kill us.

“ _Kill_ you?” she laughs. “No reason for that! I’d just have to leave you to the sky, then flense your corpses when the inevitable comes. I’m seeking _employment_ , my dear. I see you have need of a nanny.”

A confused hush descends in our bed-cramped quarters. Some of us are in league with the Devils. This may be worse.

But our thoughts turn to folded sheets and tea made proper. Biscuits before bed, and a story if you’re good. So much of the Empire’s about comforts and pretending. What’s the unending terror, next to that?

We nod, and the Familiar Nanny names her wage. It is more than we hoped and less than we feared. Mints the colour of arsenic; a word that’s too silly to say. A destiny stolen and a weather rearranged. Somewhere the sun will come over a storm, now. Tides change. Empires fall.

“Right,” says the Nanny. “All aboard, then.”

She smiles, a wound revealing teeth.

“Delightful,” she says. “Super.”


	6. Man over board

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We can smell the boards that stretch below, somehow. We can smell the stars that scream between the cracks. Light whiffs, sawdust creaks. Our engine has entered the Boarderlands.

Dorian was here before this was the Cradle, before the Mother-in-Exile was put in her prison of lights. That place was built like a house well before the Tsarevich would build its strange home. Even then, it seems, the laws were more wrong than we knew.

We are travelling there and we still have a long way to go. Our engine is tense as we spy the pine floor of the Boarderlands.

The crew were already nervous with the Sinning Saint aboard. Now that the Nanny is here, they are adrift. The Saint’s smile flares, daring them all to do bad. The Nanny’s still face tuts, demanding that they must be good. Tension mounts as they feel themselves pulled two ways. Slowly, inevitably, some become ripped apart.

The first of them jumps once we’re just past the second day in. The Saint has done something horrific, involving a bird. The Nanny has certain demands when washing the sheets. Far, far below, his body will break like his mind. It’s a long way down, to the dust moted floor of this place.

(A _very_ long way down, we think as we watch him fall. At first we panic, of course, and then we mourn. But after a while our thoughts are on other things. How vast must those floorboards be, if they are that distant? How large are the Things with their eyes, how large their riders? Perhaps they have lice that swell up twice the size of our engine. Perhaps they will come tonight and devour us all. There are those who would welcome that, we know that now. We are in a cage packed full of things that we fear more than death.)

(We stop watching before his fall is done. After a point, there is none of him left to see. His plummet may continue, even now. In the evening we’ll worry it never ends.)

“It’s not far now,” says the best of us, and we believe her. Her whole face is impassive and sleek with coal. “Not far now,” we whisper like a prayer. “Soon we will come to the oldest thing that’s here.”

On the fifth day, we finally see it. A great brass bulb suspended in the sky. Once it was tombed in wood, but the Czon rebirthed it: pulled its house to bits to make a door. The Brass Knockle is welded to the long panel of Dorian, its mouth burned shut, its eyes all sealed away. They say it suffers more than all creation.

We find that we envy it, as we pull to land.


	7. Enter the Door

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Not that Dorian!” laughs the Saint as we arrive. “Immortality is a commonplace, here.”

Astragal Station juts out of the side of the great door where Dorian sits. Our locomotive latches to it like a barnacle, to blistered metal thrust from the grain of the wood.

There are holes chewed by worryworms that could not be carved by men, curving up to the city on top of the door. Some are almost full with arriving Devils, making their way here on the Pilgrimage of Cold. Others are stuffed with less supernatural sinners, who have come to seek work and the wood. We find one slightly less crowded than the others, and all together we start our too-long ascent.

Even in a wormhole, the origin of this place can be seen. The warp of the wood contrasts and frequently breaks. All of us can see that there are joins.

“He saw when it happened,” a crewman remarks of the Saint. “He told us he was here, when the Tsarevich came down for the Knockenhouse.” Not a man can leave a scratch on the wood that now forms to a door. But it was something else, once, and the once still leaves scars clear to see.

We are not going near the Brass Knocken, not yet. Devils scowl as they scramble down Turnbilly Street, to the Cold Looms that clank away from the Knocken’s curved base. They regard the Familiar Nanny as their kind might any Jay: scowling yet afraid, prey pretending to be predatory. Eyes glint, fangs gleam. The Nanny smiles as she raps the ground with her brolly. There is a shriek, and all of them are gone. We do not understand how fast they can all run away.

The Looms spin out great threads of dark unmovement, spooling away from the Knocken who cannot scream. But we are here for something else entirely. We are here to carve out the secret of the wood.

The wood of this door cannot be cut by men, cannot be hewed or hammered, bored or burned. In heaps around Dorian are wrecks of machines that tried— here the ruin of a Fragilist, there the corpse of an axe. This place is a graveyard for things that never lived. A sentient shirt from the Clothes Communes is weeping, condemning human cruelty towards our objects. We pass by, our faces turned. Today we are too weak to remember that we are strong. We are still too fearful to know we are feared ourselves.

In any case, the object we are here for was not made by human hands— whatever the Tsarevich was when it made this door, it was no longer among our kind. What can break the wood of Dorian down, or the boards of the void that stretch so far below? That’s the mystery we’ve come here to try and solve. It tests our faith and boggles our minds.

And the Empire yearns for wood as imperious as this. If nothing else, there’ll be a tidy profit in it.


	8. A line between two types of unbreaking wood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Man has bought down gods and eaten suns. Here are the things that even our sort can’t break.

At the edge of Dorian is a hole chewed straight as bone, by a worm observing rules the Tsarevich would likely shun. A mathematician would applaud its verticality, and indeed the Empiricist grins upon the seeing of it.

“Some creatures are sane, then!” he cries with glee. “If only more among them were like us.” We are hard pressed not to agree. Sanity seems a distant memory now, a sunrise over a meadow no longer there. Once, it felt like the world was built for humans. This is the grave of a land for stars and worms.

The rail of the Perpfinicular has been built straight down that hole, following an unbending line. The House of the Rulers stands just where it begins. Here, once once revolutionaries work, intoning laws. Throughout the High Wilderness physics is breaking down, yet here it must be held to a higher standard. Straight down, the House has ruled. The line must drop straight down.

We have come here to perform an experiment for those whose cause we dare not question. The wood of the door is unbreakable by any invention of man— but there are worse creatures than ourselves along the chain. Confined to the most carefully guarded of the royal laboratories, the Hypothephae break down anything, including minds. Perhaps they might chew through the impregnable wood.

There are two kinds of wood we will attempt to destroy, and one is at either end of this line. Now, the Empiricist uncorks a tiny glass tube, and a flurry of spores breaks out in a puff of cosmogone. The hole may not be as regular when we return.

Yet the broken-up boards of the door are nothing next to our true prize. At the end of an endless straightness lies the floor of the Cradle, its dust snowstorming its surface, the void revealed by cracks between its slats. Whatever wood its floorboards are made of must be stiffer than the dreams of trees, like the idea of something solid that stands between nothingness and the world. An indestructible holdfast, an unbreakable security. The safety felt by a child who has never once known fear.

It would mean something to destroy even that.


	9. There isn’t time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hours are outlawed, yet our days must slow. Perhaps there are many ways to stop a heart.

Foreign trade of any kind is strictly outlawed in the Cradle, whether it’s legal or not. Even the black markets of the Reach find they have their own interrogators. The Empress, it seems, sees even the things she cannot see. There are laws that cannot be broken if an illusion is to endure. No one can know of the Cradle, and so no thing can enter or leave.

This is why the cramped carriage of the Perpfinicular doesn’t lie in a spooling of hours. Time is a foreign commodity; near unobtainable here. Instead we watch as the workers wrap threads of _stillness_ round our vessel, which are spun from the Knocken and other strange places beyond. We’ve all been told to wrap up warm, but also how doing so is completely pointless. Within the stillness _warmth_ is an impossibility: even the cold of the Wilderness will burn like a boiler to us.

A stoker’s breath freezes and falls too slowly to the ground. The Sinning Saint cracks off a bit of his beard to thoughtfully give it a chew.

Everything is movement, the Empiricist says. All things are engaged in an endless dance. The laws are breaking, but the dance endures: maybe a foxtrot rather than a leisurely waltz, maybe a drunken jig. But _still there is a dance_. We cling to that, or else there is nothing at all.

(And yet there _is_ nothing at all, out the glass of our carriage’s window. The stars are going out, the sun is halting. The clockwork of the worlds is running down.)

We are thinking these thoughts more slowly as time is freezing. The cold is a blast like the end of a symphony, rising and rising to a crescendo that never comes. All of us strain to hear the proud, final note—

—then everything stops, and the carriage drops down for the floor.


End file.
